Contents
Petrarch's letter is addressed to his former confessor, Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. It says he ascended the mountain with his brother Gherardo, exactly ten years after they had left Bologna. They began at the village of Malaucène at the foot of the mountain. On the way up they met an old shepherd, who said he had climbed the mountain fifty years before, finding only rocks and brambles, and that no-one else had done it before or since. The brothers continued, Gherardo continuing up the ridge they were following, Petrarch ever trying for an easier, if longer, path. At the top, they found a peak called Filiolus, "Little Son"; Petrarch reflected on the past ten years, and the waste of his earthly love for Laura. They looked out from here, seeing the Rhone and the Cévennes, but not the Pyrenees (which are 200 miles away). At this point, Petrarch sat down and opened his Augustine, and immediately came upon "People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested." Petrarch fell silent on this trip down, reflecting on the vanity of human wishes and the nobility of uncorrupted human thought. When they arrived back in the village in the middle of the night, Petrarch wrote this letter "hastily and extemporaneously" - or so he says.
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